TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2026
...we consider the need for healing: As you've probably noticed, we aren't all that "well read." But it's one of our favorite passages from literature—from literature of a certain type.
The passage comes from Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, the two-volume biography published by Carl Sandburg in 1926. Fourteen years later, Sandburg won the Pulitzer Prize for History for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, a four-volume extension of this earlier work.
We'll let the leading authority on the matter sketch the lay of the land:
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years encompasses volumes three through six of Carl Sandburg's six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln; these volumes focus particularly on the American Civil War period. The first two volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, were published in 1926 and cover the period from Lincoln's birth through his inauguration as president. The final four volumes were published together in 1939, and won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years are collectively considered by many to be "the best-selling, most widely read, and most influential book[s] about Lincoln." The books have been through many editions, including a one-volume edition in 1954 prepared by Sandburg.
Sandburg was a poet historian, what you might call a blank verse biographer. In ways which some scholars haven't admired, he let his story of the American giant, Abraham Lincoln, flow from his own prairie heart.
We're thinking today of our favorite passage from The Prairie Years. The passage comes quite close to the end of that initial two-volume work.
Lincoln has now been elected president, in the first of the two elections from which he wouldn't return. He's still in Springfield, waiting to travel to Washington—but first, he travels to rural Coles County for his final meeting with Sally Bush Lincoln, the (step)mother who initially saw his great promise.
Presidential travel was different then. Right there in Chapter 163, Sandburg describes the way Lincoln set out from Springfield on a commercial passenger train.
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years
Chapter 163[...]
Whitney got off the train at his station, Lincoln rode to Mattoon, missed connections with a passenger train, and took the caboose of a freight train to Charleston. The engine stopped at the station for orders, and Lincoln, with a shawl over his shoulders, and his boots in slush, mud, and ice, picked his way in the late evening dusk alongside the tracks the length of the freight train to the station, where a buggy was ready. Friends met him and took him to the house, where he was to stay overnight; the next morning he would go out to say good-by and have his last hour with his stepmother, Sally Bush Lincoln.
So the passage begins. Lincoln rode in the caboose of a freight train on his way to take part in what Sandburg called that "last hour."
He'd soon be trying to save a nation. Continuing directly, Sandburg, a poet historian, portrays who the president was:
[Continuing directly from above]
Among those who came to see Lincoln that evening was a lawyer, A. P. Dunbar, who had met and talked with Lincoln hundreds of times. But now that Lincoln was in five weeks to be inaugurated President, Dunbar didn’t know whether he ought to be familiar and easy as in the old days. “If he is dignified and formal, I must act accordingly,” said Dunbar. He knocked at the door of the house where Lincoln was staying; the family was finishing supper; Lincoln had eaten and was in the front room sitting before the fire; he heard the knock at the door and opened the door himself. In a flash he had Dunbar’s right hand in his, and, resting another hand on Dunbar’s shoulder, he burst out, “Lord A’mighty, Aleck, how glad I am to see you!”
Another man came in with Dunbar. They sat by the fire. Lincoln was soon drawing out one and another of his yarns, and nicely started on the fifth or sixth one, which was about a girl whose family kept a cow and who each evening would hunt up the cow and drive it home. “One day,” said Lincoln, “she rode a horse bareback to the woods. On the way home the horse, frightened by a dog or something which darted from behind a bush, made a wild dash ahead, the girl still astride, when suddenly—A knock came at the door and Lincoln halted the story, stepped across the room, opened the door, and welcomed in the Presbyterian minister, his wife, and two other ladies. Other callers arrived, the evening party began, and Dunbar and his friend went away without hearing the rest of the story.
That's Sandburg, portraying Lincoln as a regular person, at home in the presence of regular people. Dunbar never heard the end of the story, but he did hear this:
“Lord A’mighty, Aleck, how glad I am to see you!”
As Sandburg finishes this short chapter, he briefly describes Lincoln's visit to Sally Bush. As his chapter ends, he pens an evocative passage about the sources of "healing and strength" which might serve to sustain the profoundly challenged American nation during the years to come.
We'll move on to that passage tomorrow. For today, we offer this point:
If we Americans escape the danger of the next several years—the years which will follow November's elections—we'll need to conduct a search for healing in our badly afflicted land.
Given the madness of the time, disaster could be looming. But even if disaster is averted, we'll need to find ways to heal.
Are we aware of that challenge? How are we planning to do that?
Tomorrow: "The sunshine of the prairie summer..." (Poet historian speaks.)
